Synopsis: Our True Intent Is All For Your Delight
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BUTLIN'S Holiday Camps were conceived by Bily Butlin during a wet holiday week on Barry Island while locked out of his unwelcoming boarding house. He dreamt of a holiday centre for the great mass of working class families, where they could have a good time irrespective of the British weather.
Billy Butlin started his first holiday camps in 1936. On the day after Britain's decleration of war against Germany, he completed negotiations with the Ministry of Defence to build several army training camps around Britain at a discount price - subject to his being able to recover the camps as holiday centres as soon as war was over. Within weeks of VE Day in 1945, Butlin had all nine of his camps open for business and doing a roaring trade. He described his endeavour as a "socail revolution" - and indeed he offered British working people en masse access to glamourous leisure for the first time. The British holiday was never the same again.
Butlin's is a familiar part of British culture and folklore, famous for its hi-de-hi catchphrase, the camp redcoats, the Wakey Wakey breakfast call broadcast across the camps by tannoy, the barbed wire fences (built to stop non-payers getting into the camps, but contributing to their reputation as places of enforced enjoyment), and the hilarious competitions - including Knobbly Knees, Ugly Faces, and Glamourous Grannies.
By the time Butlin sold his empire to the Rank Organisation in 1972, each camp was hosting 1,000 visitors per day. The camps' popularity peaked in 1981, but then declined fast with the growth of cheap package holidays to the Mediterranean. Today there are three Butlin's holiday camps open, having been revamped in the 1990's. They are popular with families during the summer, and busy the rest of the year offering themed short breaks.
n the late 1960s and early 1970s, postcard entrepreneur John Hinde produced a series of images of Butlin's popular holiday camps throughout the British Isles. With his trademark use of bright colors and elaborate staging, each photograph featured a large cast of real holidaymakers. These narrative tableaux of Butlin's quiet lounges, ballrooms and bars were rescued from obscurity by dedicated Hinde fan Martin Parr (who introduces the book). Both grand and humble, they are now regarded as some of the strongest images of their era.
John Hinde (1916-1998) was an important pioneer of color photography in Britain. Author of several early color photography books, he was diverted into circus management before founding the traveling John Hinde Show. It failed, and he returned to photography in 1955, conceiving a new kind of postcard--brighter and better than anything produced before. He became the most successful postcard publisher in the world, although critical acclaim only began in 1993 with a retrospective exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Hinde's Butlin's photographs have now been exhibited throughout Europe and America.
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